


Let Them Talk

by Anonymous



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1930s, Banter, Brother-Sister Relationships, F/M, Female Friendship, Historical, Kidnapping, Male Friendship, Unexamined Class Issues, debutantes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-14 16:27:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29049141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Cricket has a persistent kidnapping problem, although she is starting to think one persistent kidnapper is a different kind of problem than the rest.
Relationships: Wealthy young socialite who has been kidnapped a lot this week/Her favourite kidnapper
Kudos: 2
Collections: Five Figure Fanwork Exchange 2020





	Let Them Talk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mswhich](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mswhich/gifts).



Sinclair Makepeace regarded his sister with an air of good-humoured impatience he’d had her entire lifetime to practice.

“Come on, Cricket; hop to, or I’m leaving you behind to leg it on your own.”

“You wouldn’t!” Cricket spoke with spirit, but less confidence than was truly required to sell the claim. Not that it mattered how she sounded, really; Sin could read her through any tone she used as cover.

She stole a final look in the mirror, tugged on her second glove, and decided she probably looked well enough for a ride in the park with a couple friends, always assuming Daffy was in a charitable mood and did not tell anybody that Cricket had shown up in a black hat and brown jacket, as though she actually imagined she had the bone structure required to _set_ fashion instead of merely follow it.

For Daffy, that would have to be a charitable mood indeed.

“Thanks, Sin.” Cricket dodged an improbably-placed suit of armour that her father never tired of asking her mother to move away from his study door, skipped over the threshold and ducked through the heavy front door Sin held ajar. He even forebore to thwap her backside with his own gloves in passing. “You’re a lamb.”

“Christ, don’t say such things on the street,” he implored, handing her his elbow for the descent to the curb, where the man from the garage stood beside the car he’d brought around. “I have a reputation for wanton debauchery to maintain and one charitable word from my kid sister will be sufficient to undo at least a year’s worth of the time I’ve invested in cultivating it.”

“I’m not your kid sister,” she retorted, arranging herself in the passenger seat while Sinclair traded the garage man his key for a coin. “I’m _out_ now; thrust upon the social scene and _fully_ grown up.”

Sin leaped into the driver’s seat and turned the full force of his chagrin upon his passenger.

“Firstly, know that you ought never to say _thrust_ to your brother when he is en route to debauchery. It puts conflicting images in his head, and makes him think he has been too long away from church. Secondly, dear girl, I regret to inform you that even when you achieve your dotage you’ll be very much a kid to me still.”

This time he _did_ tap her with his gloves, but on the nose, so that she crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue as though she were, indeed, a child of eight, and not ten years beyond such folly.

At least, she thought, it made him laugh. She counted as a victory the way the smile lingered on his face as he pulled on his gloves before depressing the starter, bringing his beloved Benz roaring to life. For somebody who professed himself so given to gaiety, Sin had been remarkably short on laughter of late and Cricket, occupied though she was with Mummy’s insistence on properly bringing her out, had not failed to notice.

Any attempt to properly interrogate Sin on the subject was entirely out of the question. He professed himself incapable of serious discussion and would never entertain any conversational sally which threatened to lead to it. She had tried once last week to tease it out of him under the guise of saying she meant to discover the name of his latest amorata and warn her that Sin was harbouring a dark secret, but he refused to be drawn and had avoided her company for three days thereafter.

Cricket did not want to push him away again by pressing the issue, so for now she contented herself with simply making him laugh.

“Are you coming to the Glendennings’ tomorrow?” she wondered. Sin, changing gears with a facility which belied the hours of practice he’d put in on beach roads in Newport, back when he had first obtained his driving card and she’d been his entirely too-eager passenger, freckled and pigtailed and bubbling over with self-importance at being asked to go for a drive, shook his head.

“I shouldn’t think so. I promised Father I’d face up to exactly one a week, and I was already at that mouldy old garden thing on Monday. Even God Almighty could not ask more of a man than that.”

“You know Daddy hates it when you call him that.”

It was true that the last time Sin had addressed their father as The Lord God Jehovah there had, indeed, been an unholy row, but Sin did not seem to think this signified.

“Yes, but he doesn’t mislike it for piety’s sake; he only thinks it’s insolent of me.”

“Isn’t it?”

Sin cracked a smile. “I think of the two parties in question, the one who has cause to object to the comparison is _not_ our earthly father.”

Cricket acknowledged the truth of this, but felt bound to press him on another point.

“I don’t think you can fairly say you were _at_ the garden party yesterday, though. You barely showed your face for ten minutes before Georgie Talbot’s older brother got you by the ear and the two of you larked off to God only knows where.”

“He doesn’t. He wasn’t even at the garden party, and he _definitely_ wasn’t anywhere near where Talbot and I went after it.”

“Not _Daddy_ , Sin, I meant—oh, honestly!” Cricket threw up her gloved hands in a more performative show of exasperation than reality warranted. She was entirely too used to her brother by now to take offense at even half of what he said, or to even take seriously another half of the half that was left. “Come to Helen’s, or don’t, but I still say you can’t count the garden party, so if you don’t come tomorrow you’ll need to come to something else. And it _is_ Helen; you are still interested in Helen, aren’t you?”

“What interests me about Helen, Cricket, is nothing that I can discuss in any detail at something as high-tone as her deb event.” Still, Sin’s face had relaxed into something very like its customary good humour, and as he took the corner that brought them curbside with the stables, he even gave her a direct, almost easy smile.

“You will have me done up like a black-tie sacrifice before Saturday, dear sister, I promise you that.” He leaned across her to release the door catch, then settled back behind the wheel. “Now get your thoroughly respectable self out of my car and away onto your honest brute of a horse, so that I may get on with my own plans for the day.”

Here, Cricket thought, was half a chance, if she took it carefully.

“Where _are_ you going today, Sin?”

But he simply smiled, insolent and easy, and waved his hand vaguely in a gesture that was as much dismissal as it was directive.

“To Hell, my sweet; though with a much lighter conscience than if I had brought you along for the ride. Run along, now.”

“Idiot,” said Cricket fondly, and did as she was told.

* * *

The day was perfect for a ride, but the ride itself took forever to undertake. First Helen turned up in a whirl of rosy cheeks, glossy dark finger-waved coiffure and abject apologies, begging that Cricket would forgive her crying off at the last possible minute.

“I would never dream of it except Mamma isn’t happy with the fit of my dress for tomorrow and Mrs. Becker kept saying there was no possible appointment she could find for us. Of course Mamma wouldn’t take that for an answer, and she must have called them all morning simply breathing fire, for I’ve just had word that she got me one. Only, it’s for _now_. I did _try_ to tell her we were going riding but she wouldn’t have it and I only just borrowed enough time to come tell you. You will forgive me, won’t you?”

Cricket assured her that there was nothing to forgive, and in Helen’s case, at least, that was true. As time ticked by following Helen’s departure, however, the conspicuous absence of Daffy grew less excusable by the minute.

Daphne Ellington, known to her closest friends by a pet name that might easily have been mistaken for the invention of a mortal enemy, was notoriously inattentive to the progression of a clock. By the time she finally arrived, beautifully turned out in a cerulean riding costume which set off golden curls and bright blue eyes to enviable perfection, as unaffectedly merry as if she had never even _heard_ of, much less set, such a thing as an _appointment_ , Cricket was thoroughly out of temper.

“Honestly, Daffy,” Cricket fumed, “you’re lucky Helen cried off or I wouldn’t have waited for you at all. As it was, if you’d kept me standing here a moment longer you’d have found me gone.”

“How could I have found you,” Daffy wondered, “if you’d already gone?”

To this, Cricket dared make no reply, lest she also effect a breach that would take more than a cooling-off period to repair. She was so put out at having first been hurried out the door and then obliged to stand around waiting, it took the entirety of the first half of the ride to put her back into good humour.

Fortunately, putting people back into good humour was as much a hallmark of Daffy’s personality as was imperfect attendance to her own schedule. She was not an endearing personality, but she was a comfortingly familiar one, and as she chatted freely on those subjects which were of most interest to her, Cricket found it impossible not to be drawn.

“Dress fitting, nothing doing. I’ll bet you she couldn’t bear to face you after that misprint,” Daffy predicted. “She must feel shattered about it.”

“Why should she?” Cricket wondered idly. “It isn’t as if she wrote the caption.”

“But my dear the photo was of you! And you looked _divine_ in that yellow satin, you _deserve_ to have your name got right. It isn’t as if Helen lost out by being cropped from the photo; it was her second time in that claret-coloured thing anyway. Really, she’s lucky it was only her name that they printed. Gosh,” Daffy sat up a little straighter in her saddle, even as her mare’s course became decidedly circuitous, “you don’t think she’ll wear it a _third_ time, do you?”

“Why not?” Cricket returned, slightly tart. “It suits her colouring better than anything I own flatters me. If I could find something I wore half as well I don’t think I’d ever take it off.”

This declaration was so startling to Daffy it distracted her quite handily from her half-hearted gibe.

“What, not even to sleep?”

“Oh, to sleep,” Cricket allowed. “One would have to take it off to sleep. All that beading . . .” Then she gave a cry of annoyance, and flicked her crop illustratively in the direction of her friend’s increasingly directionless mare. “ _Do_ check the poor thing, Daff, you’ve gone off into the wilderness again.”

“I don’t know _why_ she won’t mind,” Daffy sighed, hauling about on the reins until she had prevailed upon her mount to turn back in the general direction of the packed-dirt path. “One really ought to be able to just point them in the right direction and have it all fall in order, don’t you think?”

“They’re not motorbikes,” Cricket said, fighting amusement in spite of herself. “They tend to have opinions of their own.”

“How can you have such respect for the opinions of a horse, and so little for mine on the subject of Helen Glendenning’s party frock?”

“I suppose it’s because Jocko, unlike Helen’s spangles, has the ability to stave my skull in if I am inattentive.”

Daffy appeared unconvinced; certainly she was unwilling to stray from the subject of the spangles worn twice.

“It isn’t even snobbery on my part, either, because you must admit I haven’t got a thing to say against Lolo Phipps. She might come from canned soup but she dresses to a turn, and isn’t that the thing that really matters? Helen doesn’t even _try_ in comparison. I shouldn’t wonder if her entire lack of interest in keeping it interesting isn’t why Sinclair has completely gone off her. I know he isn’t what you might call discerning, but even so, a girl needs to at least make an effort.”

This did take Cricket by surprise.

“You think Sin’s gone off Helen?”

“Hasn’t he?” Daffy said vaguely. Her mount started off in a distinctly diagonal cant, so that Cricket was obliged to draw Jocko up sharply to prevent nearer contact. “Oh. Only, I rather thought he had.”

“But why?” Cricket frowned. “He hasn’t said anything about it to me.”

“Would he, though? They’re men, darling; they don’t really talk about it, they just stop coming ‘round. Hadn’t you noticed? He was all over her this summer. We could hardly take a step on the beach without tripping over him, poor fool. Oh,” at seeing her friend’s lips purse responsively, “I mean it all in fun, Cricket, I promise. You know I adore Sin, he’s simply a scream. But he was making himself a trifle pathetic over her, you must admit. Forever hanging on and asking where she’d been and what she planned to do with her evenings and pestering that poor secretary to pencil him in. It was so unlike him! He’s normally very cool and unaffected. I hadn’t thought to ever see him get it that bad.”

“But surely that was just the summer,” said Cricket, shifting uneasily in her seat. “People do get a bit bored, don’t they? Now we’re back in the city he hasn’t time to pine, but I don’t think . . . I mean, he hasn’t given any sign he’s gone off her. He’s only a little preoccupied.”

“Is he? How intriguing. What with?”

But Cricket had to confess she did not know.

“He’d think it improper to confide in me,” she said dryly, and Daffy, though she had no brothers of her own, nevertheless nodded with perfect comprehension.

“They think we don’t know about such things,” she said. “The dears.”

Somehow, this note of mutual understanding was exactly the conciliatory tone Cricket’s lingering temper had sought. Finding it achieved, she relaxed into near-complete forgiveness, and with a nod indicated the path ahead.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s give your poor creature’s head a shake, shall me? I’d like to make time.”

The autumn was by this point sufficiently advanced that the crispness of the air made one really _want_ to move, which was, Cricket thought, the secret to a good ride. Jocko was exactly as Sin had described him, an honest brute of a horse, and once he understood that they were to really stretch his legs he set to stretching them with obvious pleasure, and Cricket reciprocated in kind.

Daffy was a good enough rider to keep up, even in the face of her own mare’s habitual inattentiveness, which meant by the time they were halfway back to the starting point, Cricket’s blood had heated and her temper had completely cooled, and they were able to settle in for a proper chat on the back leg of their hack.

“. . . and it isn’t that I _mind_ Georgie sticking her oar in, only I was quite positive Philip had been looking at _me_ , so to hear her so positively deny—oh no, Cricket, don’t let’s go back just yet. I want one more turn around!”

“I couldn’t possibly, Daff; I’ve appointments all afternoon. Mummy would murder me if I missed even one of them.”

Daffy affected a charming pout that would have swayed all but the hardest heart. Her companion, however, possessed one of the hardest, or else held the demands of the aforementioned parent in greater awe than she did the admittedly well-practiced pout of her chum. Daphne, seeing the argument was lost, nevertheless sought to prolong, presumably for the pleasure of the thing.

“I do think you’re _too_ unkind, Cricket; you promised me two turns around.”

“And you promised you’d be here by ten, but it was going on eleven before you showed. Take your lumps, my girl, and call my secretary if you’d like to reschedule. I simply can’t make Mummy wait.” Cricket’s expression softened, though, and she indicated the path ahead with the tip of her riding crop. “No reason you can’t go on, if you like. I’ll see you tomorrow night at Helen’s to-do.”

“Very well,” sighed Daphne, who was, for all that she was skilled in the art of the pout and wont to criticise the more egregious fashion faux pas of her set, a very fair-minded girl at heart. “But if you dare to outshine me twice in one week I won’t mind making you miss your next dozen appointments, and your Mummy be hanged!”

With this pleasantry delivered, the girls traded farewells and Daphne guided her own mount down the path, while her companion turned out at the path which led back to city streets. Even in the face of pedestrians, limousines and innumerable other forms of city traffic, Jocko navigated these with imperturbability, and it was not long at all before they were back at the stable and Cricket was dismounting in the yard.

“Finished your ride so soon, Miss Charity?” the stable hand wondered, starting out from the shade to take the head of her horse. “And poor Jocko hardly winded, though I know you’re more than his equal, when you care to be. Quick as a cricket indeed, if I’m not too bold to say.”

Cricket, who had from an early age been obliged to cultivate a strength and size of personality which compensated for her significant deficits of physical proportion and volume of voice, was indeed rather more aptly nicknamed than her friend, and accepted the reference to that title with cheerful good humour.

“I hope I’m that quick today,” she said fervently, “or I’m afraid Mummy will say I can’t come back here for the rest of the season, if it’s going to make me turn up late.”

“Best be hopping to, then,” chuckled the stable hand. “I’ll cool him off, much as he doesn’t need it, and you can get yourself home on time.”

“Thanks, Sam!” Cricket said. “Oh, you’re too sweet.” Then she was off, not hopping, but certainly moving as fast as her boots and riding costume would permit.

As she headed back under the archway toward the street, she lost herself completely in the problem of how best to effect her speedy return home and a change of clothing before her mother summoned her to her hair appointment. If a taxi could be summoned without any difficulty, then she would probably have sufficient time to accomplish all needful tasks. If, however, she had difficulty seeing a cab, or persuading one to stop—

Before the grim prediction could even be completed, two figures stepped down from a side-door to block her path.

Cricket stopped short, startled, and when the two men made no move to proceed in one direction or another, but stood firmly abreast to cut off any avenue by which she might advance, a slow uneasiness unfurled somewhere in the vicinity of her navel.

“Pardon me,” she said, then said nothing more at all, for the larger of the two men had produced a revolver, and the smaller of the two paired it with a hard, meaning look.

“No sound,” he recommended. “Not a word. Be the worse for you then, sister, you see?”

Cricket saw.

The short man, perceiving her perception, gave a satisfied nod. He started for the street while the one with the gun gestured, using the gun, for Cricket to fall in line. She obeyed, but found to her horror that her mouth did not.

“This is foolishness,” she declared. That the same could be said of her own decision to tell them so, neither man remarked on. Indeed neither man responded at all, which did terribly uplifting things for Cricket’s nerve.

“You have a gun. You are pointing it at me. Isn’t this the most awfully _obvious_ sort of kidnapping? You’ll be stopped the moment you’re seen! We’re in the West Eighties, for pity’s sake; people are going to notice things like that. You can’t just take a girl off the street around here like something out of _Thrilling Detective_ ; somebody will _see_. Honestly, if you think this is going to work, you ought to enrol in night school.”

Still no response was forthcoming, and Cricket’s sense of self preservation seemed to endure in inverse proportion to the length of the silence. It withered alarmingly with every moment they did not answer, and she chattered madly on, almost incapable of even thinking better of it at all, never mind actually trying to stop.

“Or at least you might attend lectures, or take out a library membership, or _something_ improving to the intellect. You’ve been reading entirely too much pulp fiction. There’s no possible chance that this—”

“Shut up.”

That was the one leading the way. The quick, ferrety one with his hat pushed far back on a shiny domed forehead. He had a twitch that made Cricket glad he was not currently holding a gun. The one holding the gun was the one at her back, with his hat pulled low so that it overshadowed half of his regrettable face, all lumps and bulges and crags, like a moving mountain range. The gun seemed almost superfluous in the face of so much muscle, but he lacked the nervous tics of his compatriot so Cricket supposed if there _had_ to be a gun, she ought to be glad he was the one who held it.

“Must there, though?” she wondered aloud. She did not travel in circles where a gun was a _must_ , except for a little country shooting on occasion, so kidnapping or not, she thought that a little creativity might have rendered such a weapon wholly superfluous.

“Shut _up_!” Twitchy turned to stab a frantic finger in her face. “Not another word out of you!”

“Right,” Cricket nodded. She tried to see if her nerve had subsided and her common sense had surged. She couldn’t work it out. While attempting to discover if she planned to be sensible about this or not, she glanced back at Mt. Gunman, then down at the smallish revolver, fairly dwarfed in one half-ham of a hand. “Only, it’s such an _obvious_ kidnapping, when you bring the revolver into it. I suppose I simply wondered if that’s really altogether the _best_ way to go about it.”

“If you say one more word, sister, Butcher’s gonna knock you across the head and carry you outta here, you get me?”

Cricket frowned.

“Surely that would defeat the entire purpose of not drawing attention to yourselves.”

The Butcher mountain range at her back made no comment, and for a moment, neither did Twitchy. He stared at her, evidently flummoxed by this piece of reasoning. Cricket toyed with the wisdom of giving directions to the nearest library, the better to begin immediate improvements to the mind, then decided best not. A certain quickness of intellect was a necessary complement to humour, and she perceived a distinct lack thereof in both of her abductors. Instead, she pursued her lips and made an apologetic shrug.

“I defer, of course, to your expertise.”

Twitchy came out of his trance in a heartbeat, and leaned in close enough that she could smell the pomade and oils in his hair.

“Look here. You’re going to keep your trap shut, you’re going to walk out of here real quiet and ladylike, and you’re not gonna say boo. You got that? Cause otherwise it’ll be the worse for ya.”

 _That_ shrank her nerve back properly, Cricket noted. She nodded, mute, shockingly chastened. Twitchy appeared to believe her, for he nodded too, satisfied. On the verge of stepping into the street, however, he pivoted on his heel, and his gaze flipped back to the mountain range in the rear.

“You, uh . . . might wanna tuck it into your pocket though, hey, Butch?”

Butcher gave a grumbling exhalation but did as advised. Then he gave Cricket an experimental jab in the region of the kidneys and seemed satisfied with her flinch. Twitchy straightened his jacket (but not, Cricket noted, his hat) and advanced through the doorway into the street.

He had not crossed even half the space between the archway and the edge of the curb when a party of riders returning from the park came across the street at a smart clip, and made directly for them.

Cricket, nothing if not capable of seizing an opportunity when it presented itself, at once fell sideways and into the midst of the herd, trusting in the unflappability of the Claremont horseflesh every bit as readily as she did in the slowness of Butcher’s intellectual process.

Sure enough, there was no answering report of a pistol shot, and Cricket bobbed and wove among the heavy, heaving, glossy bodies until she came out the other side and found she had achieved the curb. There was no taxi waiting, but Sin himself had just pulled up and regarded her with a kind of blank surprise, which she supposed was only to be expected when one burst from the midst of a herd of horses like some unlikely conjuring trick.

“Oh!” she cried, and fell gladly through the passenger-side door, “oh, you came. I _am_ glad.” She at once cast an apprehensive look over her shoulder, in case her abductors should think to pursue their quarry, but the horses passed and the pavement stood clear. Evidently they had not thought her worth the chase.

“Easy, now,” Sin laughed, reclaiming her attention. “You mustn’t be _too_ pleased to see me or I’ll start to think we get along.” Then he searched her face with some sobering of manner. “Are you all right? You look a bit . . . er.”

Cricket, who certainly felt a bit . . . _er_ , had all of half a second to decide what answer to give. She made up her mind, forced a smile and shook her head. There was absolutely no way she was about to tell her brother she had nearly been taken right off the street by a couple of toughs for God-only-knew what reason. He’d probably feel obliged to be _serious_ about it, which was the most ill-suited mood for Sin. He might even feel honour-bound to report the event to their parents, as if he were the most ordinary and tiresome sort of big brother, and not the half-step up that he usually managed to be. In the ensuing row somebody would inevitably suggest they RSVP to Helen in the negative, which was the last thing Cricket wanted, both for Helen’s sake and for Sin’s.

“Only a very nice ride,” she said. “Put my all into it, you know? Oh, _do_ let’s go, and quickly. Mummy will have my head off if I’m not ready when she calls me.”

“Not much point to having one’s hair done if the head’s not attached, I should think,” Sin mused, but he nevertheless pulled out into traffic, and made enviable time on the return trip.

They were more than halfway home when it belatedly occurred to Cricket to ask what had inspired him to collect her.

“I thought you were on your way to Hell,” she recollected. “I’d not known they issued return fares.”

“I’m a special case,” Sin said lightly, and then some of the false gaiety ebbed away as he sighed, and shook his head. “Truth be told, the whole thing took on a detestable air of _business_ not long after I arrived. Can’t stand it when they want to iron out the terms of their agreement. Puts a fellow off his oats.”

“You’ve surely sown enough to have put yourself off them for a time, haven’t you?” Cricket returned lightly. She pressed her hands together with careful firmness in her lap. They were not shaking, exactly, but she detected in them a distinct inclination to tremble, and she didn’t like it very much.

“P’rhaps I have.” There was a note in his voice as he said this that provoked Cricket to look over sharply.

“Why, Sinclair Makepeace, is that a note of _gravity_ I hear?”

“Never say it,” he commanded, but even the order lacked levity. Instead he gave her a kind of wry half smile, and guided the vehicle with unusual care to its spot against the curb. “Do you know, I’ve been mulling it over and I think I might turn up at Helen’s thing after all. D’you think it will put them out very much if I do?”

“I should think hardly at all,” Cricket said promptly. In her rush of delight at this news she entirely forgot the way her hands inclined to shake. “I’m positive Mummy accepted for us all; she always does, you know, even though you and Daddy have to be hauled to the things by the nose half the time. She’s got it into her head that we all have such a jolly time.”

“Well,” said Sin, “maybe tonight it will be true.” Then he leaned across her again to release the door, and pecked her lightly on the cheek. “Thanks for putting my head on straight about it, sis.”

Cricket fairly floated up the front steps, so overcome by such an unlikely demonstration of fraternal gratitude that for the entire length of time it took her to travel from the door to her room, she quite forgot she’d nearly been abducted at all.

* * *

“No, it’s much too tightly set. She’s not yet twenty and you’ve made her look like a society matron. Relax it, please.”

Geraldine Makepeace said _please_ in a way that made you wish she’d say altogether less to you at all. Cricket, who was quite accustomed to her by now, smiled apologetically in the glass at the overawed girl in the smock, who was not.

“Thank you,” she said, when the girl had applied herself to loosening the curls and achieved the requested effect. “I like it very much; don’t you, Mummy?”

Mrs. Makepeace lifted a critical lorgnette to her eye and gave a noncommittal, gusty exhale through the mouth and nostrils.

“Oh!” Cricket said brightly. “That reminds me; Daffy and I were riding today, and she said she thought Sin’s gone off Helen. Do you think it’s so?”

“I’m sure your brother does not confide in me,” said Mrs. Makepeace, as the girl in the smock busied herself with putting the finishing touches on the style, but Cricket noted with satisfaction that a shade of interest had coloured her mother’s tone. “Did she say why she thought he had?”

“Only that he did not strike her as being quite as attentive to Helen as he was in Newport. But surely that can’t signify, can it?”

“Hardly,” decided Mrs. Makepeace, having given the matter a moment’s quiet thought. “Sinclair has his own affairs in the city to occupy him. Miss Glendenning will certainly understand what that means; she is a businessman’s daughter, after all. I am sure she cannot expect him to maintain the constant attendance she enjoyed at the shore.”

“I thought not, too,” Cricket agreed. But she noted her mother’s expression did not likewise settle, and neither did she return to the difficulty of her daughter’s hair. Instead, after a very long moment’s silence, she spoke with an air of affected carelessness.

“Do you know, my dear, I wonder . . . would it not be best to ascertain that Helen herself does not mistake Sinclair’s preoccupation elsewhere for indifference?”

Cricket dropped her eyes very quickly to her lap, and tucked her bottom lip between her teeth.

“Perhaps it would,” she said. “I do have a lot of prior commitments this afternoon, of course, but maybe tomorrow . . ?”

But Mrs. Makepeace, the spectre of the Glendenning packet-food fortune quite usurping Cricket’s various minor commitments in priority, shook her head with decided firmness.

“The day of her own party? It would never do. She will have a million other things to occupy her focus by then. No, dear, I think you must rather call upon her this afternoon. Peggy can rearrange your schedule as needed, and I will send you around in the car. You can persuade Helen of Sinclair’s enduring affection and ensure there is no miscommunication at work. Yes,” she nodded, satisfied with her own solution, “that will absolutely be for the best.”

Cricket, her gaze fixed firmly on her hands as they lay clasped in her lap, permitted herself one tiny smile.

* * *

The city address of noted industrialist Warburton Glendenning and his wife Aimee, who before her marriage had been a Taft of Boston and made a _very_ , everybody agreed, lucky catch for her beau, was a palatial white-fronted mansion of longer establishment than the fortunes of the family that occupied it. Yet Cricket, ascending the steps and putting her head back so that the warmth of the autumn sun could kiss her cheeks and, in so doing, chase away the chill of its breeze, was not thinking of Daffy’s characterization of Helen as careless of her dress, nor even of the unfortunate misprint in the society pages, which had captioned a photo of Cricket at the garden party with Helen’s own name (Mummy had vented her spleen on the subject so thoroughly at breakfast that Cricket had quite lost any desire to even pretend to care about it all). Instead she thought only of the way her brother’s gaze had rested on Helen at the beach that summer, and the fleeting unguarded expression of pure pleasure that had softened his features in a manner unlike Cricket had even thought possible for Sin.

She was still glowing with the memory of that look on his face when the door swung in and the Glendennings’ social secretary regarded her with imperfectly-concealed astonishment.

“Miss Makepeace!” said Mrs. Becker. “How do you do?”

Cricket affixed her smile with very little effort, and nodded with a kind of friendly apology for the trespass on Helen’s time she was about to commit.

“I’m not on the calendar,” she said cheerfully, “but I hoped Helen might be free all the same.”

Mrs. Becker, who kept the calendar and so knew perfectly well the truth of the first part of this statement, smiled and dropped back to permit Cricket entrance, and promised to enquire as to the likelihood of the second.

“I’m not certain,” she cautioned, “that she is at home. I am only just returned myself, but perhaps—”

“Cricket!”

The voice cut through Mrs. Becker’s explanation before she could finish making it, and the beaming, dark-haired young lady to whom it belonged came flying down the stairs moments after, trailing midnight blue satin and a silvery streamer of a belt as she flew, looking like nothing so much as a comet in a dressing gown blazing down from on high. “Oh, what a perfectly marvellous surprise!”

“Miss Glendenning,” said Mrs. Becker, sounding discreetly surprised herself. And well she might, Cricket thought: it could hardly be the custom of Mrs. Warburton Glendenning, formerly a Taft of Boston, to keep a house where young heiresses came downstairs _dishabille_. But Mrs. Becker stowed her scruples with no visible effort, and retired to parts unspecified just as Helen reached the bottom of the stairs, and put out both hands so that she could clasp Cricket’s in hers.

“Truly, how glad I am that you came! I was so sorry to miss our ride this morning, and I was only just thinking of how much I would like to see you, and here you are!”

“Were you really?” Cricket asked, with more innocent wonder than scepticism. “Only fancy!”

“Well,” a delicate blush tinted Helen’s complexion, “I suppose I thought of you _next_.”

“Ah!” Cricket’s eyes danced as she accepted the invitation to follow her friend back up the stairs. “I've been second fiddle to my brother all my life, I can’t pretend I’m surprised that it continues to be true.”

“Is he coming tomorrow?” Helen asked, and did not even bother to conceal her own wistfulness. Cricket offered up a silent prayer of thanks for that rare victory on the part of whatever luckless angel struggled hourly to master Sin’s baser nature, and replied joyfully in the affirmative.

“Oh I’m glad,” Helen said frankly. They reached the top of the stairs, and she flung wide a set of doors which opened into a palatial bedroom. “I’ve missed him. It was so much _easier_ in the summer, somehow. One could just fall out of the house whenever one liked, and wander down to the beach and fall to talking. But in the city one can go for days without seeing even one’s closest friends, if one isn’t careful.

“This morning, for instance,” she added, pausing morosely in the middle of her bedroom floor, and turning repentantly to her friend, “I had one of my rotten heads in the middle of my own fitting, so it turned out I had to break our appointment for nothing and I felt twice as miserable for knowing it. But I had only lain down to nap a moment, when you’ll _never_ guess, but somebody actually tried to burgle us!”

“They what?” Cricket said, much struck. Helen nodded with all the simple excitement of somebody recounting a tale she has seen at the pictures.

“There was a dreadful clamour at the window and it woke me. I cried out almost at once, and that must have frightened him off, because they only found his pry bar on the ground below. He must have climbed right up to the balcony, can you imagine?”

“I can’t,” Cricket said, truthfully. “I have no head for heights.” She looked speculatively at the window thus indicated. “Did you tell your mother?”

“I almost didn’t,” Helen confessed. “I knew she’d fuss, and she _did_ , but she can’t bear to cancel my debut so she’s had Mrs. Becker hire security for it. Although, after all that happened I did manage to go back to sleep and do you know, I woke up as fresh as anything?”

“Idleness suits you, then,” Cricket laughed. “Not that I’ve room to poke fun. I cried off all my appointments this afternoon just to come see you. I don’t really know that Peggy will be able to rebook all my fittings for this week; I might need to go to Georgie’s thing on Friday wearing only my unmentionables.”

“You’d be front-page news if you tried it,” Helen laughed. “Or you _could_ just borrow something of mine, if you liked.”

“Oh I couldn’t,” said Cricket, but to her surprise Helen repeated the offer. “Would you really not mind?”

Helen was quick to assure her that it would be no trouble at all.

“I’ve heaps,” she said, with unaffected frankness. “I don’t think I even care for half of them, only Mamma _would_ keep flinging them at me just in case, and it was easier to say yes than no.”

“Yes,” Cricket reflected, “I know how that can be.”

And so it came to pass that she stood starstruck in the plush, perfumed depths of Helen Glendenning’s closet, which was in fact an entire additional bedroom attached to her own by way of a private bath, made over for the dual purpose of closet and dressing room besides.

“Good Golly Miss Molly,” said Cricket, with unaffected frankness of her own. “D’you people ever know how to live!”

“Oh, do you like it?” Helen turned a little half circle, considering. “I think it’s a frightful waste. Mamma says it’s how one is to be, if one moves in society. One gets written about in papers, and if the same thing is worn twice it causes some kind of commotion. I tried it,” she added, dragging the infamous spangled gown of burgundy crepe from its discreetly-lettered garment bag, flourishing it for Cricket's examination. “I wore this one twice, and d’you know I think people did notice? It was too funny.”

“I think it looks just super on you, though,” Cricket said, around a slightly awkward twinge at the knowledge that she and Daphne had both noticed. “You’ve got the colouring for it. I couldn’t manage anything like it myself, on account of my hair. Mummy says a redhead in any shade of red is too Orphan Annie for words.”

“I thought I might wear it again tomorrow,” Helen confided, “just for larks, only Mamma said I should wear the white one they put me in this morning.” She cast a considering eye over the racks. “I wonder . . .”

In a trice she had another garment bag off the rack, and whirled around to present it to Cricket with barely-constrained enthusiasm.

“This!” she said. “Oh, this. It’s just the thing. You’ll see.”

Cricket, opening the bag, had to admit that even if Helen was the sort of person who would wear a dress twice, she could not on this point fault her taste. The gown was spangled, like the burgundy, and of a similar cut, but the colour was a rich teal. Cricket’s face split into a smile before she could stop it, and Helen, at the sight, clapped her hands in satisfaction.

“I haven’t even worn it _once_ ,” she confided. “Papa sent it over with the burgundy one, and I didn’t think it would look quite right on me. You simply must take it for tomorrow. There are shoes, too; dyed to match. You’re welcome to them as well, if they fit.”

“Golly,” Cricket said faintly. “You _are_ generous.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” Helen wondered, and waved vaguely at the corner. “Go on, try the shoes. That’s the part that will be trickiest to alter if they don’t fit, though I suppose there’s always newspaper in the toes, if need be. We’ll figure it out. Oh, Cricket,” with an impulsive burst of sincerity, “I _am_ glad you’ve come!”

* * *

Cricket did not end up going home until much later that night. She was invited, quite cordially, to stay for dinner, keep Helen company in the hours thereafter and “settle her nerves,” as Mrs. Glendenning put it, before her debut the following night. Not, Cricket thought, that it was _Helen’s_ nerves which wanted settling. She noted Mrs. Glendenning appeared more than ordinarily brittle, and seemed to cast an inordinate number of glances at the darkened terrace windows all through the supper hour, finally summoning somebody to go out and put on all exterior lights.

The girls retired after supper to visit a while longer until Cricket caught sight of the time and said, with some surprise, that she had really better call her driver.

“Do try the dress on though,” Helen urged. “If it doesn’t suit, I’ll want to loan you another. And if it doesn’t fit, you’ll want to know in time to have it altered.”

So Cricket closeted herself in Helen’s room and ascertained that the dress, though it did run a little longer on her than it probably should have, was perfectly wearable. The shoes, they had discovered earlier, were not, and they were much longer than even a little newspaper in the toes could correct. However even the wrong shoes could not damp Cricket’s pleasure at the sight of herself in the dress, and she wandered downstairs quite happily, in search of Helen to show her the result.

The lower level had a kind of gently-lit quiet that was customary for large houses following the supper hour and prior to bed. Cricket, feeling entirely at home for all that she had hardly ever been here, drifted aimlessly out onto the terrace, which was now lit with electric light bulbs shielded by frosted glass globes. She lingered a moment, drawing several deep, steadying breaths of the evening air.

Helen’s conversation today had entirely allayed any fears Cricket might have harboured that Helen was not thinking of Sin. It turned out that she was very much thinking of him, and Sin was pretty clearly thinking of Helen, and Cricket was honestly thinking Sin could do very much worse than Helen, but also that Helen could do a lot better than Sin. She was beginning to wonder how exactly to frame this fact in a positive and forgiving light when a light step sounded on the stones at her back.

She turned to offer her apology to whatever functionary whose work she had disrupted with her presence, only to discover it was not a servant at her back.

The man who stood there was neatly dressed in street clothing, his suit unremarkable and hat likewise. His face, however, cast half in shadow though it was, more than compensated for the forgettable nature of his clothes. Cricket stared, much struck by the angular strength of the jaw and the way his eyes seemed to bore into her with a kind of . . . surely not horror?

She frowned.

“Are you a guest of the house?” she said, since it seemed one of them should say _something_. Still, the stare. Did she have something on her nose?

“I . . .” he stared a moment longer, then appeared to regain control of his composure with fierce speed. “I beg your pardon. This will seem an unspeakable liberty, but I need to insist you remove that gown.”

Cricket stared.

The man in the hat stared back.

“You’re mad,” she said flatly. “There’s absolutely no chance that I should ever agree to—” Then, belatedly, “oh! I see, it’s a joke, is it? A hazing thing? Some of the girls are terrible for that. You’ve been put up to this by one of Helen’s friends, maybe, or . . . or . . .” She trailed off. The man was still staring fixedly.

Fiercely.

“I do apologize,” he said, and spoke in tones of such grave sincerity that Cricket really did half believe he meant it, “but I must insist.”

And he took from within his jacket a gleaming little revolver, not unlike that which Butcher had drawn on Cricket earlier that same day.

At the sight of it, all the nerves Cricket had suppressed over the near-kidnapping, which she hadn’t even really let herself think about at all since the moment it had happened, came screaming back to her in full force, and more besides.

Her hands shook.

Violently.

Visibly.

The man, perceiving the tremors, had the grace to look severely discomfited. He swallowed, but gestured uncompromisingly with the weapon.

“I won’t hurt you, Miss. Not if you cooperate. The dress, though. You must take it off.”

“I won’t,” she insisted, and where she found the nerve she’d probably never know. “I absolutely will not.”

“You can retain your . . . your underthings,” he said persuasively, “I don’t mind about them. It’s only the dress I want.”

Cricket looked down at the spangles shimmering and sparkling like muted firecrackers under the warm glow of the electric lights. The man with the gun stood beyond the light cast by the glass-paned patio doors, his face and figure visible to Cricket only because the lamps at her back cast a light strong enough to reach him where he stood in the shadow of the great house.

“The dress,” she repeated thickly; slowly. “You want . . . the dress.”

He nodded.

“The dress only, Miss. You have my word.”

“I don’t know what that’s worth, really,” Cricket said doubtfully, looking at the gun he held. “You seem a little untrustworthy, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I take no offence,” he assured her. “Indeed, I think it speaks well to your ability to judge character that you are disinclined to trust a fellow who’s drawn on you like this. But you will simply need to take me at my word that if you do not remove the dress, I shall be forced to remove you, in it. I really cannot leave without it.”

“But why?” Cricket wondered, looking down again. “Is it . . . is it specially valuable, or something like that?”

“Not in the least I should think,” said the man with the gun. “That is to say, I have no concept of its value myself, but I don’t imagine it would run for anything more than a dress of its type usually would. Whatever that is.”

Cricket, unthinking, told him. The muzzle of the gun took a violent dip.

“God almighty! Who pays _that_ for a dress?”

Cricket frowned. “Helen’s father.” Then, with renewed distress, “Oh, you can’t possibly. This is Helen’s gown. I can’t allow—you _can’t_ take it, it doesn’t even belong to me.”

“Then you won’t miss it.” His tones were almost soothing, as if he really did want her to feel at ease with the necessity of removing the gown on the terrace and turning it over to him. “I’m afraid, though, one way or another, the dress is coming with me.”

One way or another.

His threat of a few moments previous returned to creep around the nape of Cricket’s neck, all sinister and slow. Remove the dress, or be removed in it.

“Oh this is completely unfair,” poor Cricket sobbed, “I can’t be kidnapped twice in one day. It’s absurd. Whoever heard of being kidnapped twice in a single day?”

“Twice?” The query cracked out of the man with the gun. He stepped closer, and Cricket saw his face animate with a most peculiar expression. “You say somebody else has been here already?”

“Not _here_ ,” Cricket hiccupped, teary and cross and feeling dangerously as though she were living in a kind of fever dream. “Or rather, there was somebody here, but that’s not what I meant. I meant earlier, when I was riding. Or, done riding. Two men tried to take me.”

“But they did not attempt to remove the dress?”

“There _was_ no dress! I was riding! You can’t do that in a dress. At least, certainly not in a dress like this, and I don’t go in for that side saddle business. No girl my age does. It’s too hopelessly old fashioned.”

“Glad as I am to be kept abreast of what’s modish in hunt seat,” said the man with the gun, “it’s entirely beside the point. The men who tried to take you today; what stopped them?”

“My brother,” said Cricket. “Well, the horses did, really, but they might have caught up with me again, only my brother was right there and it all sort . . . came together.”

“And is your brother at home tonight?” wondered the man with the gun. “Could he, perhaps, be persuaded to entice you to remove the gown and deliver it to me?”

“It’s not his house,” said Cricket, her voice very small indeed.

 _Now why_ , she wondered, _did I say that? I should have said he was home and armed to the teeth and skilled in any number of dastardly fighting techniques he learned on his many travels across the Continent_.

The fact that Sin’s time spent on the Continent had more likely been whiled away in athletic pursuits of a very different sort, she did not think it would be as beneficial to impart.

It was only at the sight of the amazed expression on her captor’s face that she realized she had said at least part of this out loud.

“Um,” she said. “That is to say . . .”

“Please,” he said, sounding almost strangled, “say nothing further. Only remove the dress, and I will remove myself. There need be no second kidnapping tonight, I am only too happy to restore you to the bosom of your brother, in whatever house might in fact be his, in whatever state of dress he cares to receive you. But you _will_ remove the gown, and I _will_ —”

But what he would do he was not fated to reveal, for in that moment Helen appeared in the window, and at catching sight of Cricket gave a glad smile and started for the door.

Cricket, before she could think better of it, cried “Oh, no!” which shriek had an electrifying effect on the man. He spun, saw the door opening to his right, and without waiting to see who might pass through, fled into the shadows and vanished into the dark.

“ _There_ you are,” said Helen, flinging the terrace doors wide and passing through. “And you’re wearing it! Oh it looks _perfect_ on you, doesn’t it? Do keep it, Cricket; I want you to have it. I really do think it _belongs_ with you.”

 _Helen_ , Cricket longed to say, _there was an unfairly beautiful man here with a gun who tried to steal your dress, and was willing to steal me with it_.

But she did not. Instead she said,

“Helen, if . . . if the burglar were to come _back_ , do you think . . . would your mother cancel your debut?”

Helen’s face underwent an almost comical series of expressions in rapid order. Confusion, horror, suspicion, then dawning comprehension . . .

“I don’t know,” she said. “Oh, Cricket, don’t _tell_ me.”

Cricket shook her head helplessly. She allowed Helen to lead her inside and settle her on a chair. With particular care she sketched out a much abbreviated account of her meeting, and her friend reacted with very gratifying alarm.

“I should tell Mamma,” Helen said, but Cricket forestalled her with a hand on her arm.

“No, don’t, please! What if she does cancel it?”

“What if she does?” Helen retorted. “My goodness, Cricket, you said he had a _gun_. What if he comes back?”

There was that consideration, of course. Cricket considered it.

“Might it not have been a friend of yours?” she asked wistfully. “Some kind of prank?”

“All of my friends around here are yours, too,” Helen pointed out. “If you didn’t know him, it’s likely that neither did I.”

“Someone that they could have hired,” Cricket persisted. “An actor, perhaps. He might have mistaken me for you; I _am_ wearing your dress, after all.”

“And if it was an actual kidnapper who took you for me?” Helen retorted. “What then?”

“Well then he can’t have been a very good one!” Cricket pointed out. “What sort of kidnapper doesn’t try to know what the person he’s kidnapping is even supposed to look like?”

“I can’t believe,” Helen said faintly, “that you are really trying to persuade me this is _any_ sort of all right. Why, one would think you faced down men with revolvers every day of your life!”

“One might,” Cricket agreed grimly. Then she took both Helen’s hands in hers, and gave them a squeeze.

“Look here. Your debut isn’t at _home_ , is it? So why should you being burgled here stand in the way of what happens there? And you said there would be security, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Helen acknowledged. “Mamma insisted. Stick-up artists are a particular horror of hers, and after he tried to get in here this morning she said she couldn’t be easy in her mind without somebody there.”

“So, you see, what chance could he possibly have?” Cricket said coaxingly. “One man against trained security! It’s not any kind of a match at all.”

Helen was looking at Cricket with a kind of incredulity that Cricket knew she deserved. Even so, she couldn’t bring herself to give way. It was as if some outsize combination of Daffy’s casual derision and Sin’s wandering attention and the fact that Cricket genuinely _liked_ Helen, and knew that the things Helen did not especially care about were still things that mattered, for now, and—like mothers—needed to be appropriately managed and manipulated in order to secure a certain path forward to happiness, had all risen within her to eclipse even the very real fear she had felt during both her kidnapping attempts that day.

“I can’t imagine,” she said, “that he would dare try it. And even if he did—honestly, Helen, he wasn’t really all that scary!”

A small smile curled one side of Helen’s mouth, as if she understood perfectly well what motivated Cricket to attempt such ridiculous heights of deception, and possibly even appreciated it.

“Very well,” she said. “Since it was you he accosted, it is to you I will defer.”

Cricket flung both arms around Helen in an impulse of celebratory gratitude.

“It will be perfect tomorrow,” she insisted. “Absolutely perfect, you’ll see.”

It was the work of only minutes to change back into street clothes, after which the garment bag containing the just-right dress and too-big shoes was draped over Cricket’s arm. Helen walked her to the door, and Cricket made very certain not to step outside until the door to her car was already held open, at which time she fairly dove across the brief expanse of pavement and into the safety of the back seat. Then the door clicked snugly shut behind her, and she fell back against the cushions in a weary, worn-out puddle for the duration of the drive home.

* * *

“That dress is very becoming, Cricket; I don’t remember buying it.” Geraldine Makepeace raised her lorgnette to inspect the garment so admired. Cricket shrugged into her wrap double-time.

“Thank you,” she said lightly, dodging the unasked question. She might have worried that her mother would pursue the line of inquiry, but if there was one thing Mummy could be relied upon for, it was to find the flaw. Sure enough,

“Those shoes don’t exactly _go_ with it, though, do they?”

“No,” Cricket agreed readily, “they do not.” No need, she thought, to tell her mother that the shoes which _did_ go with it were in the garment bag upstairs in her bedroom. She spared her reflection only the most fleeting glance in the hallway mirror before skirting the armour and heading out the door, taking refuge from her mother’s inevitable discomfort at learning a friend had _given_ her a gown (“as though your father were not perfectly capable!”) in the comparative security of silver shoes worn under a teal party dress.

It was, though Cricket did say so herself, the perfect way to put her mother off the scent. The moment Mummy wound down about the shoes, still four blocks away from their destination, Cricket was able to say “why isn’t Sin with us, anyhow?” which gave her mother just enough time to vacillate between stiff disapproval that her son had delayed his arrival at the event to work later hours than usual, and excusing Sinclair’s admirable work ethic as one which should win him the approbation of any young lady he sought to woo.

Their arrival was timed perfectly with the terminus of Mrs. Makepeace’s explanation, and Cricket quite forgot everything else. 

Helen’s party looked exactly as she had hoped. Large enough to warrant the cloying approbation of the society pages, well-attended enough to allay any of her mother’s lingering doubts, and glittering in a way that made Cricket bubble with secondhand joy, as though this veritable fairyland were as much her own victory as it was her friend’s. She clasped Helen’s hands in the receiving line with fierce joy, and said, “it’s the most beautiful party, Helen.”

Helen’s own face shone back at her in acceptance of this truth. When they touched cheeks, her confiding whisper ruffled Cricket’s marcelled curls:

“I’m so glad you insisted.”

Cricket, vindicated, sailed into the thick of the crowd and wondered exactly how quickly she could contrive to lose her mother without catching Hell for it. Thankfully Daffy found them almost immediately, and proved an unlikely answer to prayer as she greeted Mrs. Makepeace with mechanical civility before turning her attention to Cricket with a grimace and complaint:

“I told you _not_ to look so well tonight; I call that _very_ unfair of you.”

Cricket accepted this in the spirit of a compliment, as intended, and assured Daffy she looked every bit as enviable, which was all she had wanted to hear. Then they burdened their mothers with each others’ company and quickly veered away to the far side of the room.

“She’s wearing white,” Daphne noted, as they stood back from the roughly-delineated dance floor. “She looks well in white, don’t you think?”

“She looks lovely in anything,” Cricket said firmly.

“Yes,” Daffy sighed, petulant but resigned, “she really does.” She cast a considering eye around the room. “Sin hasn’t shown up to see her shine, though, has he?”

“He’ll be here,” said Cricket, but she was not as confident in her prediction as she sounded. Daphne, however, had already lost interest. She had spotted Philip Talbot across the room, and waved with a ferocious determination not to be politely overlooked. Philip seemed equally determined to accomplish overlooking her, but Daphne was not to be put off, and started off in his wake.

Cricket watched her go, more amused than alarmed for either party. She lost sight of Daffy as a new crop of dancers took the floor, but this had no chance to disappoint her for at almost the same moment a familiar figure in neat black evening attire crossed her field of vision, and she dove for him with a glad cry.

“Sin! You did come, oh I’m _pleased_.” Cricket clutched at his arm in a frenzy of genuine delight. “Helen will be, too. She was hoping that you would.”

“Was she?” Sin’s gaze, which had rested so fondly on her a moment before, tore free and went skipping over the raucous crowd. “Is she about?”

“Didn’t she receive you?” Cricket wondered, looking toward the front door.

“Oh, I didn’t come in with Mother,” Sin said vaguely. “That probably explains it.”

Cricket didn’t see how—lots of other people hadn’t come in with her mother, and yet surely Helen had received all of them—but before she could point this out, Sin detached himself from her arm and said he had to find Helen and pay his respects. Since she could hardly argue with that, Cricket drifted across the floor to pick up Philip Talbot, who was cowering imperfectly behind a support column, and induce him to ask her to dance, which he did with almost minimal coaxing on her part.

“Georgie said she was supposed to occupy Daphne tonight,” he groused, “but she’s gone and let me down. Thanks for the rescue, Cricket. Though,” doubtfully, “I guess I shouldn’t say so, if she’s your friend.”

“She is,” said Cricket, “but it’s nice to be appreciated. You may have me for two dances before I abandon you. How’s that for generous?”

“Am I such a burden?” he wondered, and she laughed.

“Only to my feet.”

“Right.” He looked down, frowning, as if watching his would keep them off of hers. “Must mind the ten. Keep me on my toes, and well off your own. D’you know, Cricket, I had God only knows how many hours of this trotting tripe at school, and I still can’t seem to manage a turn around the floor without doing a minor injury to whatever poor damsel I’ve accosted? It’s enough to make you laugh in the face of evolution.”

“I’m not sure,” said Cricket, “that evolution accounts for poor dancers. It’s probably not the type of skill that’s required to bring down a buffalo, or whatever it is we used to eat.”

Philip acknowledged the truth of this, and even managed to go the rest of the dance without treading on Cricket’s feet. He launched into the second with visibly improved confidence, only to break off with a low cry of chagrin a few steps in.

“You haven’t stepped on me,” said Cricket, a little faint but still mechanically reassuring.

“No,” agreed Philip, “but, eh . . . you did step on me.” He flushed. “I shouldn’t mention it, though.”

“Did I?” Cricket said vaguely. Her fingers were biting rather deep into the fabric of his jacket. “I’m sorry, Philip. I thought I saw someone I knew.”

“Well that’s nothing startling, is it?” he wondered. “Must know most of the people here.”

“A surprising number of them are strangers to me,” Cricket admitted, “but this one . . .” She cast around, searching. “Oh good. There’s Helen. Could you steer me in that general direction, Phil? I’ll introduce you to the little blonde at her side, if it helps.”

“Right-o,” said Phil, with boyish enthusiasm, and at once set off on a whirling and madcap path which cut a swath through most of the dancers and got them to Helen’s side in double time.

“Betty Harrison, Philip Talbot. Phil, Betty is a good sport about having her toes trampled and probably won’t hit you ‘til you’ve done it at least three times. Go with God, children, and be happy.”

That task accomplished, Cricket turned to Helen in a frenzy of urgency and said, “Look, please, can you tell me—that man by the door with the dark suit on and the face that looks like it was carved from quarry leftovers. Is he somebody you know?”

“Well, not to speak to,” said Helen. “He’s security.”

She was no longer dancing, but Cricket’s head whirled round in a mad trot all the same. Helen put her hand out in some concern.

“Say, Cricket, are you feeling quite the thing? Look, have a seat. I’ll go see if I can’t find Sin, shall I?”

Cricket could not find wit or will to argue, nor even to point out that Sin had last begged off her company by saying he was going in search of Helen, but sank obligingly into the seat Helen drew up and watched her friend vanish into the crowd.

She might have tried to stop her, except Helen was moving _away_ from the front door, and that was exactly the right direction for her to be moving. Cricket didn’t want to see her friend moving anywhere near the front door, because the big man with the hideous face and the neck like one of the missing pillars at Corinth was by the front door, and Cricket did not want anybody she cared about anywhere near him.

He had tried to kidnap her yesterday.

 _I should have told somebody_ , Cricket thought, staring at the whirling crowd, the swirling bodies all caught up in the strains of Meyer Davis and the grip of some excellent imported vintages. _First thing. I should have told Sin, or even Mummy. Mummy’s a frightful bore in so many ways, but she would still have_ done _something. Only I didn’t want to ruin the night, and now he’s here, and it may ruin everything._

It was true that Butcher seemed disinclined for the moment to turn on the crowd. If anything he seemed to be doing his level best to guard it. But perhaps that was part of his cover. Maybe he was a member of a stick up gang that worked as security to get into a party, and rob it. Or maybe he really was a security guard, and the occasional abduction was a necessity, the better to make ends meet. Whatever the truth of the matter, it would soon be a problem entirely out of Cricket’s hands. Helen would fetch Sin, and Cricket would tell him everything. Although he might disbelieve and scoff and scold her—oh, Cricket thought, the _unbearable_ irony of Sin ever being in the position to justly scold _her_ —but whatever else came of it, she would no longer be in it alone.

Just the very relief of that thought eased the tension that ran from the nape of her neck to her navel. If you had ever told her that she might one day be joyfully anticipating the steady, rational problem-solving presence of her own brother . . . well.

Then into the quiet of her newfound peace of mind came the discordant note of a low voice from behind her, soft and silky and rich with quiet menace.

“On your feet, sister.”

Cricket jerked around in her seat, but a hand clamped down on her shoulder to anchor her rudely in place.

“Sorry. I shoulda been more specific. You’re gonna stand, see, but you’re gonna do it nice and quiet. For real this time, eh? None of that running your mouth business you pulled earlier today. I think you’ve got reason enough to see things my way; don’t you agree?”

And at the unsubtle jab to the left of her spine, all of Cricket’s knots came snarling back a thousandfold. Because this time, it was Twitchy who held the gun.

* * *

Nobody seemed to notice. Cricket thought she should probably be grateful for that. She stood on knees that should not have been able to hold her: they felt like a pair of set gelatines left out in the sun about an hour past the time everyone was meant to have eaten.

 _And why_ , she thought despairingly, as her stomach curled and curdled, _did I have to think of food, of all things, at a time like this? I think I might be sick._

She stumbled ahead of Twitchy’s guiding hand, away from the dancers, toward the wall of glass-paned doors that let out onto the rooftop patio. There were people out there now, but not many, and none of them were probably in any greater hurry to be seen or see others than Cricket’s captor was to be seen with her. It would work, she thought. He’d push her away from the crowd, and then . . .

 _Why don’t I scream?_ She wondered, half despairing, half alarmed at her own ready compliance. _If I had screamed earlier . . . if I had told somebody earlier . . . but he has a gun. And Butcher probably does, too. And if I do scream, somebody else might get hurt._

They were already out on the patio by now. The lights of the city flickered and glowed, a swimming, shimmering fairyland laid out like a magic carpet entirely too far below. Twitchy was prodding her viciously with the weapon, and she misliked the way he seemed to be trembling, now, at her back. _Keyed up and nervous, I shouldn’t wonder. Well, I know how that feels._

Even so, she was forced to acknowledge she felt very little sympathy for his distress overall. He had brought it on himself, for one, and for another he had done so at her expense.

Her thoughts whirled round in a dizzying, unsettling sort of loop as they proceeded to the far end of the patio, past a couple snuggled down amidst the ivy, past a distracted young lady whose eyes had rested on them only long enough to ascertain they were not the party she sought before she looked back to the door again. And still Twitchy prodded Cricket onward, toward a set of stairs leading to a lower, smaller level, _down_ the stairs, almost to the bottom when—

“Oh, Sin!” a cry of feminine frustration went up from behind them. “Have you seen Kip? I think he must have forgot we ever meant to meet, or else he’d—”

“Haven’t,” came the answer, brutal in its economy. “Sorry. But have you seen Cricket? Betty said she thought she saw her come this way.”

“Oh.” A really damnably misplaced sense of tact coloured the girl’s tones with deep uncertainty. Cricket, hearing it, thought she might fairly scream. She _had_ seen her, but with the exquisite discretion of one girl meeting her lover in service to what she presumed was a fellow soul, she was reluctant to expose her to her own brother.

 _God damn her precious tact!_ Cricket thought wildly. _Do I scream? Do I dare? He might shoot me, but if I let him take me away . . . Oh, but if I scream he might shoot someone else. He might shoot Sin . . ._

The decision was taken from her hands by her brother himself, when he ran to the edge of the patio and looked down. Spotting her rushed along in the distant, faintest glow of the lamplight, he gave a shout.

“Cricket!”

She started to turn, almost entirely out of instinct in response to the sound of her own name and the urgency she heard in his voice. The gun dug into her back with grim, lethal fury.

“Keep walking, sister.”

Sin was running down the steps.

“Cricket, what the hell—”

Again she started to turn, still mostly out of instinct, but now also out of mounting anger and a desire to resist. Again the gun pressed close, and this time his hand on her shoulder tightened. She was pressed along by those two points of contact, and Sin’s exasperation rose in a crescendo of agitated fury and some other, deeper emotion Cricket could not name. Something she’d never heard from him before. It made no sense, but it almost sounded like . . . fear?

“Sin—” she tried again to turn, only this time Twitchy did not hold her back. Instead she found herself _forced_ around, staring up at Sin where he staggered to a halt on the second-last step.

“Cricket,” he said, “what in God’s name are you . . .” Then he trailed off. His gaze settled on the face above her shoulder, and something blank and white and cold settled over his whole face like a mask.

“Christ,” he said. “What the _hell_?”

The gun was no longer at her back. The gun was under her chin, the muzzle driving up, and Cricket gagged in shock and fury and the sudden blunt pain of it all.

“You have an interest in the lady?” Twitchy wondered. He was still moving, stepping back. The people on the terrace had seen them— _really_ seen them—at last, and a ripple of panic washed over the scattered assembly. One woman screamed. Two people ran back into the ballroom, almost too fast for Cricket to hope they had run with some thought of fetching help. But that was all right, she hardly had time to focus on them, because suddenly the only thing that she could process at all was the fact Sin—her useless, affable, gadabout brother—had reached into his own evening jacket and drawn a revolver of his own, which he levelled with almost _damnable_ coolness at the face of the man who held her.

“I have an interest in making sure you don’t leave here.”

“Oh,” said Twitchy, “I’ll be leaving all the same. Of course,” with rich malice, “I’ll be taking her as well.”

“Like absolute hell you are,” Sin said almost cordially.

“You want to try to stop me?” He gave a terrible dig with the gun, so that Cricket gurgled.

“You want to try your luck?” Sin wondered. His aim did not waver.

Twitchy took another step back. Then another. Sin stepped forward, aiming with purpose. Cricket gave a low warning cry, but too late. The mountain range that loomed behind him had separated from the shadows to apply its own gun to the back of his neck. Sin trembled, but did not lower his.

“I have a clear line of sight from here to the top of your confederate’s head,” he informed Butcher.

“If I had a better line on _this_ little lady,” Twitchy retorted, “she’d be choking on it. Come on, kid. Drop the gun.”

Sin hesitated another moment, and then with glacial slowness, did as he was told.

The last sight Cricket had of his face before Twitchy gave a grunt of satisfaction and hauled her away into the dark would haunt her for years to come.

* * *

“How is it you know Makepeace, anyway, sister?” Twitchy wondered. He had forced her back into the building at the far end of the terrace, this time through a service entrance. Now he was rushing her through vacant, chilly corridors double time, and it was all she could do to keep on her feet. “When we went to collect you yesterday nobody said two words about you being in with that crowd. Just grab the Glendenning girl and bring her right along, no fuss.”

“Helen,” Cricket said, feeling numb and very far away from it all. “You thought I was Helen.”

“Sure we did. Your picture in that paper, her name underneath it. Anybody woulda made that mistake. But you’re not her, only you’re cozy with her, and now it’s got to be you all the same.”

“Why?” Cricket asked. Her tongue moved sluggishly, disobliging and thick, her mouth dry. “Why has it got to be me?”

Twitchy did not seem in any rush to answer. He was pursuing his own line of thought.

“You’re something to Makepeace, though, either way. That should come in handy; he’s been gumming up the works like nobody’s business this week. I was told the Glendenning girl was something to him, too, but what do I know? Maybe he’s got one for every season. Glendenning girl for summer, another for the fall. That you, sister?”

Cricket nodded, numb.

That was her, she supposed. Sister. But . . .

“What works?” she said. “What . . . how do _you_ know Sin? What even is all this about? And was that your friend last night who wanted to make me take off . . .” Oh, what did it even matter now? At least that one had been polite and handsome and even almost kind of tolerable, for a kidnapper. At least he’d given her _options_.

Twitchy was just giving her the creeps.

He was also giving her a nasty look, pushing her right to the end of the service corridor, into a service elevator that he somehow knew exactly how to operate. She watched in mute wonder as he manipulated the controls, sending them sailing down through the building to the ground floor, and then jerking her close against him before he opened the steel cage once more.

A dozen steps brought them to a door set deep in the wall, and only then did he appear to pause.

“We’ll be leaving the building now,” he warned her. “You might see some people as we do. You might think it would be smart to ask ‘em for help. You’d be wrong, sister. You got that? Your face would the last thing they ever saw. I wouldn’t try it.”

Cricket did not have wit or will to argue or even second guess this advice. Instead she let him push her through the door into a brightly-lit corridor, some kind of side atrium, something near the front of the building where they had come in. Twitchy wrenched her tight against him so that she stumbled in step with him. She could scarcely look where she stepped, didn’t notice the rushing dark figure detaching itself from the shadows until it was almost atop her. Then, and only then, did she look up and scream.

He didn’t stop. Didn’t even look at her, that she could tell. Rushed right past, in fact, tackling Twitchy to the floor and catching him under the chin with a hard right cross significantly enhanced by the gun he wielded as he struck.

Twitchy sagged back to the ground, and lay still.

For a moment Cricket stared, heart racing, uncomprehending. Then she thought of Sin, with Butcher at his back, and started back for the party with a cry of alarm. Before she had taken three steps the newcomer was on her, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her firmly, though not roughly against him.

“Steady on,” he advised. “Look, I’m sorry, but . . . I do still need the dress.”

Cricket went rigid with shock and alarm.

“You,” she said. Then, improbably, irrationally, “oh, no. Four is just the _limit._ ”

The man holding her seemed genuinely confused.

“Come again?”

“Four,” said Cricket, helplessly. “It’s too much. _Four_ in one week. I’ve never been kidnapped even once in my life before yesterday, and now this makes it four! Unless, I suppose, you don’t want me to count that time last night at Helen’s, but I do, because you _were_ going to take me away if I didn’t take off the dress, and I wasn’t going to take off the dress. So I do count it, and you can’t stop me.”

She was almost entirely out of breath and wits, but her mouth would not stop. She was shaking against him, now, and the words just kept coming.

“I’ll even come away with you,” she said, “I will, or you can ask Helen for the dress if you must, I bet she’ll let you take it, she’s the _nicest_ girl in the world, I don’t care what Daffy says, only please, _please_ , my brother’s still back there and there’s another man with a gun and I need to know he’s all right before I let you take me or my dress anywhere. _Please_.”

The man holding her seemed to have run out of ideas of how to stem the tide of information.

“Miss,” he said, a little helplessly. “If you really could just take a minute . . .”

“Oh but he doesn’t _have_ a minute,” Cricket fairly shrieked, writhing in his grip. “He’s an awful idiot but he’s my only brother and I can’t leave til I know he’s at least alive, _please_.” Then in a futile effort to at least raise some manner of affirmative reply, she raised her voice and shrieked “ _Sin!_ ”

The effect this had on the man clutching her was nothing short of remarkable. He let go her waist at once and jerked back a pair of rapid steps. In spite of herself she turned, querulously, to look at him.

“Sinclair Makepeace,” he said, in tones thick with wonder, “ _is_ your brother.”

“Yes.” Cricket stared at him, feeling ever more rapidly at sea.

“You’re not somebody from the Glendenning house at all. You really are Cricket.”

Cricket blinked.

She took a cautious, anxious, step back.

“Yes . . .”

“And you—damn,” as the memory of her frantic plea came back to him, “wait here. I’ll go see if he needs my help.”

Cricket did not wait. She followed her least committal abductor of the day right back up the steps to the ballroom, through to the terrace, where they discovered Butcher prostrated on the tiles, a smallish crowd of partygoers ringed around him where he lay. Sin was just in the act of rising from checking that the man’s wrists were bound, exchanging terse words with Philip Talbot, when he caught sight of the man running out from the thick of the gathering, Cricket hot on his heels.

“Townsend!” he yelled, the relief that broke across his expression in that moment almost painful for Cricket to behold, if only for the truth of the panic which must have preceded it. “Townsend, if that’s not the most timely arrival I could have— _Cricket_. You’re all right.” He was across the terrace in an instant, catching her up and clutching her tighter than she could remember him doing since they were kids. “I’m sorry. A hundred times—I’d have told you. I should have told you. Then maybe . . . but you’re all right. That’s the main thing. You’re all right. And I’ll tell you now,” he promised. “I’ll tell you everything.”

* * *

* * *

Nicholas Townsend, called Nick from the nursery and Old Nick after he lit into a boy at public school whom he had caught tormenting a rat he’d trapped in the dormitory, was known as Devil’s Own by the time he went up to Oxford and just plain Devil by the time he was rusticated for quarrelling with a professor.

He might have thought this unfair, since he deemed every fight he entered one of unavoidable moral consequence on some level or another, but honestly he quickly found it suited him not to have very much expected of him at home, and he did not concern himself overmuch with unearning the nickname.

Of course this succession of sulphuric sobriquets delighted his American cousin to no end when she was sent over to make her Continental debut, and he was appointed to escort her to the various necessary functions. After her debut she insisted that he must come back to the United States and meet all her friends. Because Nick found Daphne Ellington the very worst kind of fascinating, he had imagined her friends must be also, and politely declined the pleasure of their collective company. However, when dragged to her ghastly farewell fête and introduced to somebody called Glendenning, a towering roundish wall of sound brandishing a half-disintegrated cigar, who was apparently considered The Goods back home, it had all begun to get a bit more entertaining.

At the same fête he was introduced by Daphne to a lounging kind of creature who looked as if he, too, would rather be just about anywhere else, but at least had the courtesy to look the last word in fashion despite his patent disinterest.

“Sin,” she said, “this is my cousin Devil. You can’t pretend that’s not the funniest thing you’ve heard all day.”

It honestly _had_ been, up to that point, but Sinclair Makepeace quickly set about topping it.

“Nicholas Townsend?” he said, as soon as Daphne drifted away in search of other amusements. “I was hoping to run into you. I was told to have a word, if I could manage it.”

“Consider it managed,” said Devil, immediately intrigued.

Sin had that knack: to make one immediately intrigued. He was a madly perfect blend of energy and indifference, and you found you wanted to know more about whatever he found interesting, because you could trust you would be interested, too. And that trust, in Devil’s experience, had not been misplaced.

The morning after Daphne’s fête, Sin took Nick to the most unassuming lunch counter he had ever seen, where they sat down on either side of a large, unassuming man in the middle of a sandwich.

“He’s not averse,” Sin said, as casually as though he were asking after the weather.

“I didn’t think he would be,” said the man, and when he brought the sandwich up for a slow, considering bite Devil got the definite impression of having seen him somewhere before, though not clearly or often enough to be able to put a name to him. “Tell me, Townsend: how were you struck by Warburton Glendenning?”

“He seemed rich enough to be forgiven how extremely American he was,” said Devil, before he could remember to pretend to the type of discretion that this kind of meeting clearly called for. Once the assessment was out, however, he saw no point in doing anything but stand by it, and this appeared to be the correct course of action.

“Definite of a type,” agreed their lunch partner, unruffled by such plain speaking. “And he may be nothing more than the type that he appears to be. But his secretary is in it up to his neck, and Glendenning himself does not shrink from doing business in Germany, so we would like to know if that business is strictly of the packet-food variety, or if there is a little more being traded under his nose than that.”

The sandwich was set gently back on its plate.

“You and Makepeace, here, are of a type that can be excused displaying a protracted interest in the household. You on this side of the ocean, and Makepeace on the other. If you get a line on whatever it is they’re sending out—what we _think_ they’re sending out—then you follow it back across the water, and call Makepeace in to assist you on that side.”

So Devil had been drafted into some kind of improbable spy caper, although they were very strictly forbidden to call it that.

“What _do_ we call it, then?” Devil wondered, as he and Sin sauntered forth from the lunch counter as casually as though they had partaken of nothing but lunch.

“Call it a lark,” Sin had suggested. “A game, if you will.”

“Is the chancellor much given to games with American industrialists, or their clerks?” Devil had asked dryly. “I thought he had bigger things on his mind just now.”

In reply, Sin said only that it needed to be a game because they were nothing close enough to official to call it anything else.

“Good,” said Devil, “I should find officialdom a bore.”

Sin then departed across the ocean into the wilds of high society, pursuing Glendenning’s daughter as his cover, leaving Devil to ingratiate himself with the Continental arm of Glendenning packet foods. This was accomplished easily enough, given the introduction Daphne’s people had given him at the fête, and he was soon passing for a credibly incompetent and altogether disinterested employee of elevated rank and ignoble ability.

There was, he was pretty sure, no earthly chance anybody could possibly suspect him of being anything but a useless and entitled limpet of the worst possible sort, accorded his position entirely because of who he knew and not what he could do. It would have made him screamingly unpopular with the staff, except that he took care to be scrupulously polite to compensate for also being hopelessly indolent, and never shrunk from standing everybody to drinks as often as they all went out for them. In this way he managed to walk a fine line between their exasperation at his transparent incompetence, and their grudging appreciation for his inspired generosity, which lasted him right up to the day that a cable arrived on his desk, ostensibly a request for a lunch date from an old school friend, but in fact a pre-arranged code which was to signal that Something of Note was on its way into the office: the object that they had taken to calling The Package.

Devil’s pulse picked up.

The following day, Warburton Glendenning returned from touring his factories farther afield and threw the entire office into a swirl of activity.

“He’ll be going back to America, you’ll see,” predicted Nancy, who worked down in the switchboard but did not scruple to make herself available on the upper floors for conversation when the mood struck her. “Misses his wife and daughter, you know. He’s really quite a family man, though you wouldn’t think it, the way he travels.”

“Not him,” said Bert, who was clerk to an upper management individual of middling-to-low importance, as upper management went. “He’ll be here weeks yet. I heard Becker saying so. Sending the usual packet of things over to the family, though, so I suppose he must be sorry, or hope he seems it.”

“Oh?” Devil tipped back in his chair, as though he could barely bother to interest himself in such things at all. “What sort of packet?”

“You know,” Bert said, evincing barely more interest than Devil himself. “Jewels and frocks and suchlike. Always does that, every quarter. Sends poor Becker trotting round all the toney shops of Europe, he does, and amasses the most godawful pile of silk and silver you’ve ever seen. Makes the Missus smile, though, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Nor should I,” said Devil. His gaze slid over to Nancy. “Say, Nancy? I’m good for a favour, aren’t I? How’d you like to send a cable for me?”

* * *

Nicholas Townsend followed garment bags and jewel boxes overseas with nothing but pure nerve and a terrible sense of foreboding that he might well be on a wild goose chase. The first night was a wash, as they spent it docked at Cherbourg and he did not like to risk the increased shipboard activity as they departed in the wee hours of the morning. Nevertheless he was able to use his second night to sort out the schedule of the watch, and gain access to the hold by the third. He spent that and the subsequent night in a feverish if more or less methodical search of the goods, working his way through what he thought was probably an unforgivable quantity of luxury goods and turning up nothing that could resemble a hidden compartment or pocket or secret communication.

“Might be a wild goose chase start to finish,” he was forced to acknowledge as he crawled between the sheets at the end of his fruitless search. “I must have turned over just about everything that was there. If I didn’t find it, maybe it wasn’t there to find.”

But the conclusion did not sit right with him. There had to be something there. It seemed inconceivable that it would not be. He disembarked the following morning wreathed in conviction, though bereft of foundation for it, and was genuinely glad to be met warmly and with every appearance of true welcome by Sin.

That gladness lasted him exactly as long as it took them to reach the comfortable walk-up Sin kept for himself, where Sin confided in the one thing he had done that summer past which had not been at all according to their plan.

“In love!” Devil stared at Sin, aghast. “You can’t be serious!”

Sin spread his hands, palms up, appearing only the mildest kind of apologetic and the worst sort of unrepentant.

“As much as it goes against character for me,” he reflected, “it would seem that this time, I am. She’s a perfectly perfect girl, Devil, you must take my word for it.”

“I don’t know about that, but I do know I must take a moment,” said Devil faintly, and dropped into a convenient chair. “My god, man, this is absolutely the limit. In _love_ with the daughter of the man we’re tasked to . . . look into?”

“My rotten luck, isn’t it?” said Sin cheerfully.

“How did it even happen?”

“Damned if I can figure that out. I meant only to get a little closer to her this summer; see if I couldn’t get a line on how the goods were gotten across. It was simple enough at the start, she’s a friend of my sister Cricket, and I sort of fell in with her crowd easy as you please. They were all coming out at Newport, which . . . well, if you haven’t had to survive a summer debutante season, I won’t regale you with war stories. Only take my word for it that there’s no rager you’ve ever once been to that can compare with the sort of party put on by a society mamma, and do whatever you can to keep away. One night there were _warships_ providing _lighting_ , can you credit it? Great galloping frigates off the coast of New England, and Mrs. Vander-Rocke-Bob’s-your-uncle commanding their search lights to brighten the garden patio of her godforsaken summer home!”

Sin paused a moment, shaking his head in latent wonder.

“Anyhow, I squired Cricket to a few of the things, and most days I went with her to the beach, and Helen was there, always there, always as pretty as a picture, perfectly charming and sympathetic with a smile that could light the night brighter than an entire fleet of frigates.”

This type of poetry had the effect on Devil that the sea he had just crossed had on much poorer sailors. He went a little greeny-grey around the jawline.

“Cut the rhapsodies,” he said hollowly. “Only tell me that you’ve found out _something_ about this thing I may or may not have followed all the way over from dear old Blighty and utterly failed to find.”

“Oh!” said Sin, distracted from his poetic reminiscences. “Yes, that. Well, the goods were all meant to be sent to the family home, but we were able to prevail upon the customs agent to retain them a little longer than planned. We have every hope that someone will soon be along to say what gives, and then we might know more than we know now.”

“Wouldn’t take much,” said Devil.

“Cheer up!” instructed Sin, crossing to a respectably-stocked bar and availing himself of its offerings. “Haven’t you just quit a very nice job and sailed ‘round the world on a lark? You’re an entire ocean away from a life of industry and purpose. You must learn to be glad of it.”

“Well,” said Devil, accepting the proffered drink, “I’ll try.”

* * *

The customs agent got in touch not a day later to convey the information that somebody had come to petition for release of the impounded items. Devil took the call.

“He said she was a woman of near to middle age and, I quote him here directly, ‘full up of starch and the kind of good manners that make you wish she had worse ones’. Frankly, Sin, I did not know customs officials were so given to character assessments.”

“Well, he’s our man, so he’s bound to be a cut above,” Sin said thoughtfully. “I wonder that she didn’t oblige him to release them to her. If it was Mrs. Glendenning, she’s not the sort who really absorbs a no.”

“She didn’t have the correct paperwork,” said Devil. “Or that is to say, he made sure she didn’t. Allowed her in to take a look and ensure it was all in order, and gave her to understand it would be a lengthy process to have them liberated.”

“And did he catch her making for any item in particular?”

“She poked around here and there, but took especial care to inspect the contents of two garment bags. So all we have to do now is nip over, nobble the goods and we should be well on our way to having this thing sorted.”

It did not, however, prove as simple as all that. By the time the two young men reached the pier, a beautiful limousine had achieved a piece of prime parking real estate beside the customs impound lot and the last of the generous shipment from Mr. Warburton Glendenning to his wife and daughter was being carried aboard, closely overseen by a competent secretary and directed with all the skill of an accomplished choreographer from the depths of the car by Mrs. Warburton Glendenning herself.

“Damnation,” said Sin. “You know, if she weren’t going to be my mother-in-law I could quite happily nip over there and give her a pop to the nose, just for complicating matters so thoroughly . . . ah! Our man in customs,” as a shell-shocked looking official in navy blue uniform with smart brass buttons appeared in the doorway. “Quick, quick, I think we may be clever about this still.”

He and Devil took a circuitous route across the pavement, keeping behind the minimal number of pallets to better obscure their advance until the limousine had pulled away and they were within earshot of the much-reduced customs official.

“Hsst!” said Sin. “Hsst, Nigel!”

The customs official, whose name was Frank, nevertheless responded to this summons.

“You’ve only just missed them, Sir,” he said dolefully. “My god I never did know such a woman as that. Went away and came back with another, she did, and the driver besides, and a stack of documents like I’d never seen. Must be a very thorough outfit, theirs.”

“One of the most thorough,” agreed Sin, popping a little notebook from a pocket of his jacket, and a small gold pencil along with it. “However, I had hoped, while the image was fresh in your mind, that you might be able to sketch out the name and imprint of the dressmaker that was on the particular pair of garment bags which so attracted that fine lady’s attention. It’s of especial importance to us, you see, to know which one caught her eye.”

Frank was not much by way of being an artist, nor was he able to recall the name, which he said was of decidedly foreign extraction, but of which specific foreign parts he could not be sure. He did, however, remember the lot numbers precisely, and most gratifying to the gentleman were the cries and low whistle of appreciation from his audience when he was able to point to the lines on the shipping manifest which precisely described the contents of each bag.

“You’re the goods, Nigel!” said Sin. “Absolutely the goods. We’ll sing your praises to all the acquaintances we pretend we haven’t got in common, and you see if they don’t promote you to some other job you can talk about even less than this one!”

Then he and Devil took their leave of the docks, a fresh kind of hope rising up between them.

“Not long now,” predicted Sin. “What is it—Saturday? That’s ideal. There’s a thing tonight. My mother has given me to understand I will be attending, so I can sort out the finer points of next week’s schedule. At some point there will come a time when the house stands nigh-on empty and both garments will be inside it.”

“But how will you know which of them it is?” Devil wondered. Sin shook his head.

“If both were of interest to her, then we had better assume both will need to be taken.”

“How can you be sure there will ever be a night when both are left alone, though?”

“My dear fellow,” Sin laughed, “you don’t understand the social season that Cricket and her friends embark on in the city. There will be more than two occasions which call for wearing a gown next week, I assure you, and if a girl wears a gown once she does not wear it twice. You’ll see.”

And, humming a jaunty tune, he led his friend away from the docks.

* * *

“You said,” said Devil, late Monday night, “that they _never_ wear a— ”

“I know what I said!” Sin threw up his hands. “Dammit, man, can I help it that Helen is the most unaffected, unassuming angel to ever grace a garden party? Cricket gave me to understand that the poor lamb must face certain social censure for daring to twice glow in that get-up, and all I can say is that if this is how the fairer sex treat the fairest of their kind, I would not give a plug nickel for the chances of any man who goes against any of them. Sharks, Devil! My sister included, I do not scruple to say, though I will own she has never been unkind about Helen, and I think may be angling for a choice position in our wedding party. Which! If she defends my angel against the likes of Daphne Ellington, I shall see that she gets.”

“Well surely,” said Devil, “she cannot wear it a third time.”

“I don’t know that she _can’t_ ,” Sin cautioned. “That is to say, she might. But I gather there are other factions entering the playing field, and I don’t like our chances should we decide to just sit back and wait.”

“What other factions?” Devil asked warily, to which Sin’s only reply was a thoughtful shake of his head and polite disclaimer.

“Friend of mine— _your_ sort of friend, if you catch my meaning—caught my ear at the garden thingummy and said some very objectionable men had been asking around about me. I admit I don’t like to hear it but I don’t mind knowing that it’s so. I might have overplayed my hand a little this summer, you see. If we were spotted at the docks the other day, any person of even the meanest mathematical talent might well contrive to put up his fingers and work out what two and two make.”

“Hrm,” said Devil, unsettled. “Well, what about tomorrow, then?”

“Tomorrow might be the ticket,” Sin agreed. “Cricket’s made a riding date with Helen and Daphne, and I’ve been given to understand she’d be very grateful if I deposited her curbside for it. Once they’re all safely off to the races, perhaps I might present myself at the door and make a polite lovelorn ruckus, begging their pardon for forgetting she wasn’t home, while you shin up a drainpipe and help yourself to what’s in her closet.”

“I suppose it’s as good an effort as any might be,” Devil admitted, and the plan was put into commendable motion, with Sin collecting him at the appointed time and zipping cross-town to the Glendenning address.

Getting over the back wall to the part of the house that gave access to Helen’s bedroom was not much of a challenge, but Devil found his nerve was more than a little tried by having to wait until his watch showed the agreed-on hour and minute before he set to work climbing the trellis that creaked and gave alarmingly under his weight. Virginia creeper, Sin had warned him, could not be relied on to bear his weight like some ivies could, and so the trellis bore the brunt of the work, but it did the trick of getting him to the necessary window and sliding the jemmy out from under his jacket. No sooner had he set the thing to the latch and given it a trio of solid wrenches, however, than did an alarmed, sleep-thickened voice call out from within, demanding to know who was there.

Devil, to his absolute horror, froze.

He had never known himself as the type to freeze in extremity, and yet here, trapped on the balcony of Helen Glendenning’s bedroom with, presumably, Helen herself still inexplicably in residence, he found he could do nothing for five or six paralytic seconds before at last he wrenched himself free and, deprived of time to safely achieve the ground, flung himself round the corner of the building to cling to the drainpipe instead.

He hung there, scarcely breathing, as he heard the doors open and a light footfall cross the balcony.

“Hello?” she called, and sounded uncertain, but not tremulous. He found his admiration for the girl who had quite inconveniently turned Sin’s head around grudgingly mounting as she repeated her call, then stepped inside once more.

He heard her calling for somebody as he flung himself down the trellis again, fleeing the house and almost colliding with Sin on the pavement.

“She was _home_ ,” he snarled, his fury at the girl refusing to behave as expected returning once more, and temporarily usurping his previous admiration.

“What d’you mean, home?” he said, much astonished. “She can’t have been home, she went riding today.”

“Well then one of the maids likes to sleep in her bed when she’s out! Somebody was in the bedroom and called out to me. I had to dive around the side to keep from being seen.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sin said, baffled. “I was downstairs just now, and she said . . .” He broke off, a frown creeping across his brow, settling his features deep in shadow. “I don’t like it. Something’s not quite . . .” he trailed off, then abruptly shook his head.

“Come on,” he said. “You can laugh at me if you like, but I want to go back to the stables.”

“Whatever for?”

“I can’t say for sure. That’s why I would prefer you didn’t laugh. I only know Cricket and Helen were supposed to go riding today, and I was told they did, but you say she didn’t, and I’d like to see who all actually turned up to take a horse.”

Devil did not quarrel, but made a quiet and reflective passenger the entire mad dash back to the stables. They both went in the front, leaving Sin’s car at the curb, and enquired of a startled stablehand who was able to provide the information that Miss Makepeace and Miss Ellington had, indeed, gone for their ride but Miss Glendenning had appeared only long enough to cancel her booking.

This news did not seem to settle Sin. To the contrary, Devil thought he looked deeply ill at ease.

“Dammit,” he groused softly, “there’s something . . . I can almost put my finger . . .” he looked around, as if expecting _something_ to step out of a stall and introduce itself to him. Instead, his gaze settled on a placid horse being brushed down in the yard, and his jaw firmed.

“Devil,” he said, “forgive me, but I must take my leave of you here. You can find your own way home?” Then he went haring back to the car, leaving his astonished friend standing in his wake.

After a moment’s discombobulation, Devil turned to enquire of the stablehand exactly which exit let out on the eastern side of the building. That information in hand, he started down the indicated path, only to draw to a startled halt as a fragment of conversation floated back to him from the far end of the corridor.

“. . . keep your trap shut, you’re going to walk out of here real quiet and ladylike, and you’re not gonna say boo. You got that? Cause otherwise—”

Devil’s jaw firmed.

Well. Here, at least, was a problem that seemed more than usually straightforward.

He started down the corridor at almost an eager clip, anticipating with genuine pleasure the possibility of finally running up against _something_ he could put his fist into, only to burst out into the street on the other side and find no clear case of abduction in sight. A smartly-stepping collection of horses approached, a pair of men stood not far off to his right . . . Devil turned in a confused circle, looking for the person who had been previously warned to walk out quiet and ladylike.

A horse bumped him gently in passing, and he hastily stood clear, coming within earshot of the two men as he did.

“—go after her?”

Devil turned his head sharply. The man who had spoken caught his eye, and grimaced.

“What’s it to you, bub?” he asked warningly. His hand, crammed into the pocket of his jacket, did not emerge.

Devil smiled grimly.

“Nothing worth mentioning,” he decided, and took a final look around. Whoever their quarry was, she appeared to be out of sight, which meant she was safely out of theirs as well.

Whistling a little tune, he tucked his own hands in his pockets and headed for home. A kind of plan was forming in his head, and he had rather a fancy that for this one, he might play a lone hand.

* * *

All right, so he should not have played a lone hand. If he’d spoken to Sin first, Sin could probably have told him that the Glendenning house was lit up like Broadway at night, so that it was all a fellow who wanted to sneak up a trellis could do just to get over the wall and up to the house without feeling like he was facing one of the Newport warships Sin had spoken of with such mingled horror and scorn. Devil kept to the shadows as best he could, the gun feeling heavy and terrible in one pocket, the eye mask in another feeling improbably quite the same.

He could play the part of a stickup artist. He could do his best to burgle unseen, but if he were intercepted again by the young lady then he could surely persuade her, by theatrical combination of the unloaded pistol and the eye mask discreetly donned, that she could turn around and give him his pick of whatever treasures her wardrobe and jewel box held. He would help himself to a respectable cover of trinkets the better to distract her. That he would also abscond with the necessary garment bags he doubted she would work out until much later. By then Sin would have worked out some means by which he could return the pilfered items and nobody need be the wiser.

He was still pleasurably contemplating the comparative simplicity of this plan when the door to the terrace opened and he was obliged to dive backward into the shadows.

The girl who emerged was slight of frame, with hair that glowed a bright and improbable flame colour under the glare of the terrace lamps. She stepped closer to the balcony, set her hands on it . . .

Devil stared.

She was _wearing_ the dress.

He had, admittedly, never actually laid eyes on it. He had read the customs manifest though, and Sin had seen the other one, the claret-coloured one, and described it with the sort of haphazard feverish vagueness innate to a man so enamoured of the girl who wore the dress that he was honour bound to remember a great deal about it, but retell it badly in the wake of his passion for the girl inside it.

Seeing her, even from behind, Devil supposed he could understand the distraction. The dress itself was quite something too, whatever else its appeal for their quarry, but the girl . . .

He was not conscious of having made a sound; he could hardly even be sure he had taken a step forward. But she heard him and turned, and her eyes lit on him with more confusion and less alarm than he had expected, especially given his attempt to enter her bedchamber earlier that day.

It figured, he thought, that a girl Sin could lose her head over would be made of sternest stuff. But as to whether or not she could comply sensibly with what he would have to ask of her? He felt quite horror struck at the prospect.

She was asking . . . what was she asking? Was he a guest here? How could she be so calm? He should say something. He really should.

He spoke with scrupulous courtesy, but she was, understandably, unable to appreciate his tone in the face of his demand. She was unable to even fully understand that he was serious. She was asking him if it was a joke, if he’d been put up to it by somebody, by one of her friends . . . no, hang on, she hadn’t said—

Oh. It was his turn to talk.

He apologized. It seemed the right thing to do. But he really did need the dress, and he would need to remove her in it. She was denying ownership of it altogether, and he felt like he was losing his last lingering grip on the situation, and then, oh hell. She was starting to _cry_.

Then she said something that made his blood freeze.

_I can’t be kidnapped twice in one day._

He had originally thought he might take her directly to Sin, to let Sin explain, but somehow this was unfolding in an entirely different direction. For one thing she kept speaking _of_ Helen. As though she herself were not Helen, and her declaration that her brother had stopped her from being kidnapped . . .

He searched the finely-wrought features, trying to see some hint of his friend in there. If this was the sister . . .

Before he could ask her outright, the patio door swung open and his nerve snapped entirely. He fled into the night, cursing his own impetuousness and the ridiculously compelling young man who had first suggested he might want to look into a little bit of smuggling for a lark.

* * *

“It can’t have been Cricket,” Sin said quite positively for the umpteenth time, as they drove through the night toward Helen Glendenning’s debutante ball. “It can’t have been. She never said a word about any kidnapping when I picked her up, and why shouldn’t she tell me, if it had been she?”

Devil was honestly more than half convinced by now that Sin was correct, and there was no chance of it having been Cricket either, yet the description he gave of her had clearly rocked Sin to the core.

“Can’t have been,” Sin repeated. “Can’t, possibly.”

“Of course not,” Devil said soothingly. “Of course it can’t. Look, you go in there and you make sure Helen’s where she should be tonight, wearing what she should be. Then you give me the signal, I’ll trot round to the house I’ve tried to burgle so many times that it’s begun to feel like a second home, help myself to those blasted gowns and we can finally put the whole adventure to bed.”

“Yes,” Sin agreed. His shoulders twitched unhappily under his coat. “Yes, that’s for the best. And I’ll make sure Cricket is there too. Just . . . just as a matter of course.”

“Naturally,” Devil agreed. “Naturally.”

He took Sin’s place behind the wheel and slouched down comfortably, watching his friend start up the steps. Set a pair of opera glasses comfortably to the bridge of his nose and trained them on the agreed-upon window, brightly lit, through which he could spy the milling crowds. There was an easy gaiety to the entire proceeding, he thought, watching figures whirl past. A sort of comfort that spoke to the level of planning that must go into such an event, the meticulous behind-the-scenes machinations of a scheme so well ordered it feels almost spontaneous when executed.

A master planner, he thought, still watching, waiting for Sin to appear and give the signal. A quiet, thoughtful, intentional presence behind the scenes . . .

Something cold and thoughtful traced its way through his subconscious.

Even as he was trying to put his finger on what it could be, on what it was, Sin appeared. A flick of the handkerchief. All was in order. Devil could leave, and—

Devil froze.

The opera glass, trained on the window of the upper level ballroom, froze too.

What the hell was the man he had seen on the pavement outside of Claremont stables doing at Helen Glendenning’s coming-out ball?

He did not pause to think better of it. He simply vaulted over the side of the car and raced up the steps, taking them two at a time. Whatever he was running in there to stop, to prevent, he couldn’t be sure. He just hoped he’d get there in time.

* * *

“And you did,” Sin concluded, sounding almost cheerful. “Nick of, in fact.” Then he laughed, briefly, at his wit, before guiding the car to a halt in front of their house.

“Idiot,” Cricket said reflexively, then stopped. Shuddered. She pulled closer to Nick, whose arm went around her so naturally, so instinctively, she didn’t question it. She just burrowed in closer.

They had fled the terrace together, all four of them. It had been an impulse at first, but once acted on it felt right. All around them the party was breaking up, the word of what had happened travelling in stages and staggers through the main event until, she knew, it would reach Helen’s mother.

Until it would reach _hers_.

“We’ll be going home, soon,” she had said, and sought Helen’s gaze across the felled form of Butcher. “They’re going to make us all go home . . . oh, Helen. I’m sorry. You had _almost_ all of your debut, but it’s not entirely the same thing.”

So they had fled in advance of the disappointment. Helen could come home with them, Cricket insisted, and stay until her mother missed her, and Helen had been so distraught she had not even tried to argue, just slipped into the seat beside Sin as Cricket settled into the back beside Nick, pressing close to the solid warmth of him, not even caring to wonder how somebody she’d so recently imagined was about to make away with her entirely could now seem like the safest place on earth.

Helen, however, was not thinking about her debut at all. As Sin killed the engine and helped her out of the car, as they all crossed the pavement and let themselves into the darkened interior of the Makepeace house, some deep confusion twisting her pretty features into a kind of fearful query.

“But . . . but is it my father, then? Papa? You really think he’s—oh, I can’t believe it! It’s too absurd!” She drew stiffly back from Sin’s attempt to embrace her, which Cricket saw hurt him as deeply as a blow from Butcher’s fist might otherwise have done. A knock to one’s soft spot had that effect.

“My father wouldn’t. Couldn’t, possibly!”

Sin looked almost as miserable as Helen looked irate.

“We don’t know,” he said. “Not for sure. But it doesn’t make sense that your mother would have been receiving the items if it weren’t your father sending them, or arranging to.”

“Mamma?” Helen gaped. “You think it’s _my mamma_ who went to the docks and—oh it’s madness! She wouldn’t!”

“But if not your mother,” Sin said, soothing, rational, absolutely infuriatingly calm, “then who?”

A dry cough echoed across the foyer, and all four of them turned, as if in tableau, to regard the neat, dark figure standing at the foot of the stairs, a garment bag draped loosely across one arm.

The other held remarkably steady, as of course it would have to, given that it was the arm Mrs. Becker was using to aim the gun.

“Ah,” said Sin. “I see.”

“Do you?” Mrs. Becker asked dryly. “I wonder.”

“Well!” said Sin, “I suppose it should have come to us sooner.”

“Much,” Mrs. Becker agreed.

“Only,” Sin said, deeply apologetic, “it just didn’t occur to us, because . . .”

“Nobody thinks of the secretary,” Mrs. Becker finished for him, still perfectly pleasant. “I know it well. It’s worked very well for us though, you must admit. I think my husband may have been rather less discreet, as I gather he’s been an object of scrutiny for some time, but I do flatter myself that absolutely nobody looked at me twice.”

“That’s so,” Sin assured her. “Very clever . . . Devil, you’re looking a bit sideways just now, what is it?”

“Um,” he said, clearing his throat, “it’s only that . . . well, when I was watching the party, it did sort of strike me how well it all ran, and I had half a thought that of course nothing runs so well without somebody to plan it, and . . . well.” He shrugged. “I should have known.”

“Now, now,” Mrs. Becker soothed. She took a step forward, gun raised. Then another. Then another. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”

She took aim.

“That would be a terrible way to spend your final moments.”

Devil’s hand flew out, instinctively, to cover Cricket at his side. He thought, possibly, Sin might have done the same, only he hadn’t time to check and see. A colossal bang sounded throughout the foyer, and he jumped, shutting his eyes instinctively. The longest, heaviest silence hung over the entire proceeding.

Then he opened his eyes and took in the sight of Mrs. Becker pinned beneath a toppled suit of armour, a tall man standing in the study doorway blinking down at her.

“God Almighty,” Sin said faintly, and Cricket gave a sob.

“Oh don’t,” she said, breaking loose and running across the foyer to fling her arms around the gentleman. “Don’t, Sin: you _know_ he hates it when you call him that!”

* * *

Helen Glendenning’s party was written up in every newspaper of note, for only half the right reasons.

 **Glendenning Heiress Stuns!** was probably, Cricket had to agree with poor Helen, the most charitable headline of the lot. All the rest could not resist touching on the evening’s _other_ excitement in some fashion or other, and of course Helen was too fair minded to blame them.

“Only imagine,” she mourned, staring at the garment bags that had just recently been returned to her possession and Cricket’s. “Both pairs of shoes with the heels crammed full of secret codes, sent to me on my father’s own say so, and I’d not the slightest idea.”

“No more had your father,” pointed out Sin, lounging comfortably on the sofa opposite. Cricket hissed and made meaningful gestures at him to lower his feet, but he only grinned insolently back. It was Devil, at his side, who accomplished the desired outcome with a single, firm push. Cricket favoured him with her warmest smile, which he returned in kind, and Sin looked from one to the other with a transparent horror and disgust which said the pair of them were entirely too beneath his notice to dignify with any kind of response.

Helen, on the other hand, he favoured with the gentlest of smiles.

“It was entirely the Beckers’ doing,” he said. “The pair of them. But until the retrieval efforts were in motion, we couldn’t be sure that your father wasn’t involved somehow. Although,” he cast an exasperated look at his sister, “if Cricket had seen fit to tell me they mistook her for you that day, we might have settled things with a great deal less in the way of amateur dramatics.”

“I didn’t even know!” Cricket protested. “I thought it was just an ordinary kind of stick up.”

“My dear girl,” Sin said, almost desperately, “why should you not tell me about _that_ as well?”

Cricket, who had already explained why many times over, told him that if he didn’t understand it by now, there was no point wasting any more time since he clearly never would.

“And it was only the first,” she said. “By the fourth I was very ready to have it all done with . . . oh, but of course,” demurely, “I promised Nick I would not call it the fourth, anymore.”

“You did,” agreed Devil, though he stared at her in such a way as to suggest he might in fact have a fourth kidnapping in mind after all. “Thank you for remembering.”

Cricket’s face warmed and she looked down at her hands, though not before she caught the look of dawning horror, chased by resignation, which settled on her brother’s face.

“I see,” he said, and she thought that maybe he did. “Well, anyhow, they were hired to secure the shoes, but bungled it twice. First when they thought Cricket could be used to acquire them, and then again when they saw her in the gown and assumed the shoes were also present.” He shook his head, something dark and ugly flickering across his face. “We got a little desperate toward the end of the night, to the point that Townsend was meant to go in and fetch them himself, so at least if the retrieval operation got that far they’d never find the actual goods. Only instead, he found . . .”

“Me,” said Cricket brightly.

“You,” said Townsend, with great warmth. “I found you.”

“Oh, lovely,” sighed Helen.

“God help me,” said Sin, pressing his face in both hands.

“Don’t be silly, Sin,” Cricket said sweetly, crossing to settle on the sofa beside Devil. She slipped her hand in his, and enjoyed the broad, solid warmth that wrapped around hers in turn. Her eyes danced in absolutely ruthless enjoyment of her brother’s long overdue discomfort.

“You can’t possibly expect him to do so _twice_.”


End file.
